Announcing General Availability of the Azure Database Migration Service!

Overview

The Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) is a fully managed migration service designed to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources to Azure Data platforms with minimal downtime. Azure DMS achieves this by integrating functionality from multiple Microsoft migration engines, such as the Data Migration Assistant (DMA), the SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA), and the Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA), to cover a wide range of scenarios. Since the November 2017 launch of the service in Public Preview, customers have used Azure DMS and these tools to migrate over 23.7K databases.

Azure DMS leverages this functionality to provide rich orchestration capabilities that enable you to organize your databases into project(s) and perform source assessment, schema and data conversion, and validation activities. In addition, you can assign these activities to one or more compute nodes to ensure that you meet your budget and/or timeframe goals. With these capabilities, Azure DMS makes it easy to plan migration tasks, run proof-of-concept migrations, author scripting for automation, and ensure that your final production migration to the Azure Data Platform is friction-free.

The service is designed as the underpinning of a cloud-scale database migration platform on which we can rapidly enable additional migration scenarios (source-target pairs). Since the beginning of the Azure DMS Private Preview May 2017, we have leveraged customer and partner feedback to identify the features and functionality that they consider most important, and to refine and augment the service accordingly.

Specifically, during Public Preview over the past few months, we have:

Added a paging and search experience to the database and table blades to enable scaling for hundreds of databases and tables.

Ensured that a current migration activity resumes after a DMS instance comes online after a restart.

Enabled customer feedback on every error blade, and the ability for uses to seek further assistance from the feedback forum.

Customer and partners who have used Azure DMS to date have provided very positive reviews of the service. Consider the following examples:

The Azure Database Migration Service was a life saver for us moving our databases to Azure. We successfully migrated over 100 databases to Azure using the DMS service over a period of two months without any downtime or loss of data. This process would have taken us well over six months and days/weeks of downtime for our users were we to using any other method. We really appreciated working with the DMS team, they made our journey to the cloud practically seamless for our SQL workloads.

The Azure Database Migration Service helped significantly in many ways. First, it alerted us to changes required. Second, it transferred the data quickly, allowing us to review the progress. Third, and most importantly, it allowed us to transfer data for static tables before transferring the dynamic tables. This was greatly reduced the downtime required to move to the cloud. Being part of the preview of this product was a life saver for me and my team.

Jeff Schwartz, Hosted Services Manager, Innovative Systems

With additional migration scenarios and functionality in Preview, we look forward to continuing to gather valuable input that we can use to make the service even better!